PrintIt’s 7 a.m. I’m sitting in the rotunda at Gladstone, still in the morning cool, and I’m thinking about the past.
It’s easy in the High Performance world, even as shallow as I’ve waded in, to get caught up in the details. The footing, the drainage in the stalls, the want of outlets for fans and fridges. Ride times and selection processes. The parking.
I still can’t set foot in this building, this place where our equestrian forebears made ordinary horses into legends, without getting a little chill down my spine. This is the Holy Land. And yeah, it could use a little modernization. But when I see the plaques on the wall from Aachen, Rotterdam, Olympia, the photos of Majors and Captains and their cavalry horses who did double-duty, setting the stage for our modern competition horses, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the nostalgia and forget, at least for a moment, about the task at hand.
I had a lucky trip here, of sorts. I was supposed to judge a schooling show at the Quantico Marine Base, something I did last year and LOVED, and I was looking forward to repeating the experience. I’d planned on sticking the horses in paddocks while I judged the show, and then going onward to Gladstone from there.
But just as I rounded the corner to get on the freeway heading east towards Quantico, the show manager called to tell me that with the rain we’d been getting all night and were due to get all day, they’d decided to cancel the show—just in time for me to instead take the freeway west towards Gladstone. Perfect timing! I’m hoping they’ll reschedule the show, and as much as it was, I’m sure, an epic pain in the patoot for them, we desperately needed the rain.
So off to Gladstone we went through some considerable storms. It took me a little longer than expected, but both the Red Hots travelled well, and the rain stopped in time for me to school Ella. The rain did make the footing here quite boggy, and with the indoor arena still undergoing renovations, they’d moved the clinic to Michael Barisone’s incredible facility, only about half an hour away; as such, I had the ring to myself, and it had dried up considerably by the time I set foot on it.
She was, to my pleasure and surprise, very respectable. She’s tight, for sure, but she’d had Friday off, and she’d spent nearly six hours on a trailer, so I can’t complain at all. I just worked on moving her back around, nothing special, though I did make a nice line of ones and some good-enough piaffe-passage, just to get her thinking about it. I find that if I work her too fluffily after a day off, she doesn’t bring her work ethic to the next day’s session.
I was just going to hack Midge around, but Debbie and Maureen Pethick, superstar coordinator here at Gladstone, wanted to see a horse go around on the footing after the grounds staff worked on it—after last year’s monsoons, and with the new footing installation, everyone wants to have a plan on how to maintain it best for the Championships.
